A Thermal Facial Emotion Database and Its Analysis

In recent years, thermal image has extensively been used in many fields such as military (e.g., target acquisition, surveillance, night vision, homing and tracking) and civilian purposes (e.g., medical diagnosis, thermal efficiency analysis, environmental monitoring). It may be a promising alternative for investigation of facial expression and emotion. Currently there are very few database to support the research in facial expression and emotion, however most of them either only include posed thermal expression images or lack thermal information. For these reasons, we propose and establish a natural visible and thermal facial emotion database. The database contains seven spontaneous emotions of 26 subjects. We also analyze a visible database, a thermal database to recognize expression and thermal information to recognize emotion.